> [Oliver] Subsequently you turned it into the well covered topic > of codecs...
The question was: As designed, is <video> a cross-browser, cross-platform solution for exactly one format, which is whatever is decided on as the freely-implementable and royalty free combination of container and compressed video and audio formats? Note that I'm not asking what those container and compressed media formats might be. I'm just trying to understand the scope of the problem that <video> is supposed to solve. > [James] Can you explain it again, because I'm not sure I fully > understand what you're trying to say and I don't seem to be the > only one. The <video> element doesn't appear solve the problem of how to embed video content in a player- and browser- agnostic fashion. HTML 5 provides an opportunity to normalize how video embedding is done for most scenarios, making it as easy to embed video as it is an image. But as designed, <video> appears to only address an as-yet-undiscovered combination of container and media formats. This seems like a missed opportunity at best. Technically, it doesn't seem like it'd be difficult to allow various media runtimes to register as first-class <video> clients. -- Charles
